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The Infinite Future.

Wirkus, Tim (author).

Wirkus’ (City of Brick and Shadow, 2014) latest novel is stupendously inventive and rewarding. In a narrative approach similar to that of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) or Michael Chabon’s Moonglow (2016), it begins with a found text, a manuscript that has been handed to an aspiring writer, Danny Laszlo. In a long, detailed introduction, he explains how he received a writing grant and went to São Paulo, where he met a librarian, Sérgio Antunes, who introduced him to the work of an elusive science-fiction writer, Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. In a Vonnegutesque shaggy-dog story, Laszlo joins forces with Antunes and a Mormon historian, Harriet Kimball, to search for Salgado-MacKenzie and his lost novel, The Infinite Future. The second half of Wirkus’ tale is the lost novel itself, a sci-fi epic which echoes Battlestar Galactica and the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin in equal measure. Wirkus’ complex novel has a Russian-doll structure, with stories within stories, yet despite all the layers and the fact that it is, essentially, two novels set side by side, it is somehow never confusing or messy. Especially well suited for fans of Jonathan Lethem and Ron Currie, this work announces Wirkus as one of the most exciting novelists of his generation.  Alexander Moran